Hassan Mead Thrives in Minnesota

Olympian Steve Plasencia coaches the Somali transplant to the top of the NCAA

Hassan Mead turned some heads at last spring's Payton Jordan Invitational track meet at Stanford. In a 5,000m race that saw Stanford freshman Chris Derrick break Galen Rupp's American junior record, the 19-year-old Mead ran away with the heat, breaking the tape in a personal best of 13:28.45.

Though the race marked a huge breakthrough for the University of Minnesota sophomore, it certainly did not come from left field. To culminate his high school career, Mead ran an 8:51 2-mile at Nike Outdoor Nationals. As a freshman, Mead steadily improved over 5,000m, clocking a best of 13:44.30 at the 2008 NCAA meet, where he finished sixth. He gained valuable experience later in the summer, competing in the 5,000m at the U.S Olympic trials, missing the finals by just one slot.

Mead, who turned 20 in June, entered his junior cross country season as the defending Big Ten and NCAA regional champion, a rising star on the American distance running scene with something to prove at cross country nationals on Nov. 23 in Terre Haute, Ind.

As a kid, Mead didn't know the first thing about running. He spent his time barefoot on a farm in rural Somalia. "We'd make kind of like a soccer ball out of old trash bags," he recalls. "An actual soccer ball was hard to get." Soccer was considered a leisure activity, something to break up long stretches of hard work on the farm where much of Mead's extended family lived.

Even at a young age, Mead spent long days helping with the animals and the crops. Life depended on it. "We owned about 25 cows, 40 goats, 35 sheep," he says. "It was a full-time job, farm work. If it was raining and all the crops were growing, it was OK, but if it wasn't ... a living was hard to make."

Living in a rural area sheltered the family somewhat from the strife that has plagued Somalia for much of recent history, but making a sustainable living in an economy marred by civil war proved difficult, so Mead's father emigrated to the U.S. and began working to bring the rest of the family to join him.

Mead's family was finally reunited five years later in Minnesota, amid a large Somali community. But during the first winter, Mead was miserable, so, with his parents' blessing, he went to live with an uncle in southern California.

On his first day of school as a sixth-grader, he had more reasons than most to be nervous walking into a new school. For one thing, he had never gone to school before. On top of that, he spoke no English. Quickly shuttled into ESL classes, Mead found only more confusion, as the instructor spoke Spanish and English. Somali? Not so much.

"The only thing I could do was math, because my dad taught me the summer before," Mead says. "When it came to social studies, or science or English, I just sat there and stared at the teacher for 45 minutes every class not knowing what they were saying. It was frustrating."